The "Regulators" keep people out of penny stocks, because that is where all the actual growth is.

The real, large growth always happens when a company gets its product to market, so it is already proven business model, and now just needs money to grow. This is actually the only growth in the stock market.
(all other growth is actually just inflation by another name.)

If we actually treated stock as what they were, a piece of the company, no one would ever sell one.
Imagine owning something that paid you and kept paying you.
Try to find an actual thing in the actual business world that does anything similar.

Cryptos are a weird ... area? thing? environment?

Some cryptos are money, and would do a lot better if more people used it to buy things.
Adoption is coming. More retailers are taking it. But we need the entire silo to be flowing the stuff.

Other cryptos are trying to solve problems, like product flow, scarcity distribution, financing.
And these will all... in the future, these things will be ubiquitous.
Any crypto that exists in the future will have all the things that are important to it.

So, right now, in the imagination phase, while we have a "stock market" frame of buying and trading these "things" is there any money to be made.

The universe rewards people for solving problems.